Gulf Developer Podcast series 09

I am extremely pleased to announce the very first ‘Microsoft.Net focused podcast series in Gulf’. Let me give you a little bit of background first and then we can drill down into the details of who, what, how and when.

HistoryHaving been in Dubai, on and off, for past 4-5 years and being Microsoft MVP all the while has given me an oppurtunity to work with local developer communities here in the Gulf. In terms of dev communities, Kwait (with dotnetboom http://www.dotnetboom.net) and Qatar (with oryx dev http://oryxdev.com/en/default.aspx) have been successful with setting up their user groups. Unfortunately we dont have similar success story for the UAE in particular and the rest of Gulf in general.

The MotivationThis lack of dev community itself is a biggest motivation for trying to bring all the developers on a common platform. Objectives include empowering regional Microsoft developers with relevant technical content on Microsoft Platform, presenting topics in English/Arabic, sharing ideas, learning from each others experiences/mistakes and above all finding an oppurtunity to get in touch with like minded professionals across the region.

The IdeaFrom years of experience we have learned that its difficult to get developers to come and attend user group events in the emirates. Generally this is attributed to problems related to ‘commuting’ to and from the event venues as well as lack of well designed event calendar(schedule).To mitigate these potential issues, myself and Anton (from Microsoft Dubai) agreed on hosting a developer podcast series. The idea was discussed when Somasegar was visiting Microsoft Dubai and hosted local dev community for an informal talk/lunch at Microsoft Dubai office in DIC – Dubai Internet City last month.

The PlanThe plan, as i said, is to host a series of sessions targetting regional developer community. Come up with a clear agenda and share the detailed schedule with the developers so that they can mark their calendars and look forward to the events that they think are most relevant for them. Upload all the podcasts to MSDN Channel 9 so that the content can be downloaded easily (and be listened to while driving on Sheikh Zayed Road ;)).

The ScheduleI will be posting a detailed calendar in next 2-3 weeks but tentatively we have agreed on following dates and topics:-

1- Agile 101 presented by Hammad Rajjoub on 7/8th October 20092- Win 7 for Developers by XXXXX on 27/28 October 20093- Whats new in WCF 4.0 by XXXXX on 17/18 November 2009

Ofcourse this is an initial draft and we would like to get the feedback from the community and let them choose the content thats most relevant for them.

Whats Next– Watch out this space for more details as we finalize the plan and confirm the content/date/speaker tuples.– Follow us on Twitter for instant updates. http://twitter.com/DotNetMEPodcast– Provide us with your feedback on twitter or this blog post